Abstract
In 1877, Samuel Johnson wrote to a letter to Hester Thrale, affirming that ‘[i]n a Man’s Letters […] his soul lies naked’. Since the eighteenth century, epistolary writing, as well as writing about letters, has been shaped by this assumption: that letters can provide direct insights into the heart and mind of the writer. This chapter shows how Hardy subverts this view of the relation between letter and letter writer, and the humanist conception of identity at its basis. The chapter will demonstrate that Hardy’s deployment of letters reveals an extraordinarily modern conception of human identity and subjectivity
‘If I myself, madam, were only concerned personally,’ he said, in an off-hand way, and holding up a letter singly; ‘I should choose this man unhesitatingly. He writes honestly, is not afraid to name what he does not consider himself well acquainted with—a rare thing to find in answers to advertisements; he is well recommended, and possesses some qualities rarely found in combination. […] That man is sure to have a fine head for a manor like yours.’ He tapped the letter as he spoke. ‘Yes, I should choose him without hesitation—speaking personally’. (DR 112)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Samuel Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 89. As Elliott notes in ‘Thomas Hardy: Epistolarian’, in a less frequently cited letter Johnson refuted this notion, writing that ‘it has been so long said as to be commonly believed that the true characters of men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to his friends lays his heart open before him. But the truth is that such were simple friendships of the Golden Age, and are now the friendships only of children … but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate by design his own character’. See Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 206–7.
- 2.
Watt, 191.
- 3.
Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 329.
- 4.
Altman, 70.
- 5.
See Golden, 153–92. Golden documents unintended outcomes of Rowland Hill’s reforms, including newly created possibilities for fraud, blackmail, slander, spam mail, false advertising, etc. She concludes that ‘the Penny Post spawned new types of fraud, the physical artifacts of which—forgeries and falsified documents of various kinds, including letters—serve as material memories of insubordination and deception as they were understood and experienced during the Victorian age’ (177). See also Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 103–17. Hack discusses the (often, but not always) fraudulent practice of begging-letter writing.
- 6.
Rotunno, 24.
- 7.
On changing psychological understandings of human identity in the nineteenth century, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
- 8.
Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1872), 4.
- 9.
All references will be taken from the following edition: Two on a Tower, ed. Sally Shuttleworth (London: Penguin, 1999).
- 10.
See Anna Henchman, ‘Hardy’s Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds’, Victorian Studies 51 (2008): 37–64. Henchman explores the relation between ‘Hardy’s interests in astronomy, in optics and human perception, and in philosophical questions of how we can know anything of other minds when we have no sensory experience of what it is like to inhabit them’ (38). Throughout TT, Hardy evokes that Swithin’s insight into the stellar universe is paired with striking obliviousness to others’ thoughts, feelings, and needs, especially Viviette’s.
- 11.
Altman, 124, 129.
- 12.
Cousineau, 27. Significantly, Cousineau also argues that, in reality, a correspondent ‘is never the singular self that the letter’s signature promises’ (29).
- 13.
See Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 117. Thomas explains that ‘Viviette […] becomes literally undone by her desire which seeks to assert itself outside of the conventional marital formulation. Unable to give a name to her sexual and emotional relationship with him, she is unable to give a name to herself’.
- 14.
See my discussion of Sue’s signatures in Jude in Chapter 5.
- 15.
See William A. Davis, Thomas Hardy and the Law: Legal Presences in Hardy’s Life and Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 61–2. Davis writes that ‘Viviette’s purpose following the revelation about her husband (or husbands) is “to establish herself legally as that young man’s wife”. The secret ceremony must be repeated, she tells Swithin. The definiteness of her purpose contrasts with the marital confusion that surrounds her. Viviette plays four marital roles in the same chapter that reveals the facts of her legal situation: she is Swithin’s wife, though the role is made void now; she is the widow of Sir Blount; she becomes a bigamist and the victim of a bigamist; and she becomes the rejector of the Bishop of Melchester, who has proposed marriage’.
- 16.
See Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 91. According to Murphy, despite the negative characterisation of Dr St Cleeve, ‘the narrator nevertheless quotes the lengthy document in its entirety; the opinions not only are allowed to stand without rebuttal but are even repeated later’.
- 17.
Davis, 62.
- 18.
‘1895 Preface’, in Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor (London: Penguin, 1998), 3–4. All quotations will be given from this edition.
- 19.
This quotation can be traced back to a notebook entry from 1870, when Hardy was courting Emma. On 25 April, he wrote: ‘Nine-tenths of the letters in which people speak unreservedly of their inmost feelings are written after ten at night’ (PN 4).
- 20.
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 105.
- 21.
See Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, 77.
- 22.
All references will be taken from the following edition: A Laodicean, ed. John Schad (London: Penguin, 1998).
- 23.
On the history of the post box, see Jean Young Farrugia, The Letter Box: A History of Post Office Pillar and Wall Boxes (Fontwell: Centaur, 1969).
- 24.
See UGT, 100. Dick writes to Fancy, demanding a clarification of her ‘bearing toward him’. He composes several drafts, until the ‘letter was considered so satisfactory in every way that, being put into the hands of a little boy and the order given that he was to run with it to the school, he was told in addition not to look behind him if Dick called after him to bring it back, but to run along with it just the same’. Like Havill, Dick makes the conscious decision to relinquish control over his communication, giving himself up to the consequences of his letter.
- 25.
All references will be taken from the following edition: The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. Tim Dolin (London: Penguin, 1996).
- 26.
See Penny Boumelha, ‘“A Complicated Position for a Woman”: The Hand of Ethelberta’, in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret Higonnet (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 255. According to Boumelha, ‘[a]lthough it has very commonly been assumed, both in and out of Ethelberta, that a woman’s writings are, as Christopher Julian puts it, “natural outpourings”, the novel shows a radical discontinuity between the private life of its heroine and the “public proverbs” of what it is possible for her to say’.
- 27.
Nemesvari, Sensationalism, 164.
- 28.
See Widdowson, Hardy in History, 181. According to Widdowson, HE offers an imaginative account of Hardy’s own experience of mobility. Widdowson maintains that ‘[m]ost significant in [this] context […] are Ethelberta’s two letters to Christopher in chapter 9, one of which tells the truth about her background, which she destroys; the other simply compounding the “fiction”. It is a striking instance of the novel’s self-consciousness that it can proffer both versions of the “truth” about Ethelberta (and about Hardy), “destroy” one and retain the other—while in fact preserving both for the reader: it is, in effect, the apotheosis of Hardy’s own legerdermain in writing this “fiction” about his own (“real”) class position’.
- 29.
Jane Thomas, Femininity and Dissent, 91.
- 30.
See Charles Dickens and W. H. Wills, ‘Valentine’s Day at the Post Office’, Household Words, 30 March 1850, 7. Dickens and Wills write that ‘[a]n acute postman might guess the broad tenour of their contents by their covers: business letters are in big envelopes, official letters in long ones, and lawyers’ letters in none at all; the tinted and lace-bordered mean Valentines, the black-bordered tell of grief, and the radiant with white enamel announce marriage’. See also William Lewins, Her Majesty’s Mails: A History of the Post Office, and an Industrial Account of Its Present Condition (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1865), 299–300. Lewins emphasises that ‘a great deal can be known from the outside of a letter, where there is no disposition to pry into the enclosure. […] From our long training among the letters of our district, we knew the handwriting of most people so intimately, that no attempt at disguise, however cunningly executed, could succeed with us’.
- 31.
See Nigel Hall, ‘The Materiality of Letter-Writing: A Nineteenth Century Perspective’, in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, 83–108.
- 32.
Hack, 37.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
All quotations will be given from the following edition: The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer and Penny Boumelha (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
- 35.
Golden, 198.
- 36.
Thomas Hardy, Collected Short Stories, ed. Desmond Hawkins (London: Macmillan, 1988), 550. All quotations from Hardy’s short stories, with the exception of uncollected and collaborative ones, will be given from the same edition.
- 37.
See Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP), 133.
- 38.
Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (New York; London: Routledge, 2010), 53.
- 39.
Ibid., 53, 2.
- 40.
Mireille Bossis and Karen McPherson, ‘Methodological Journeys through Correspondence’, Yale French Studies 71 (1986): 68.
- 41.
Barbara Zaczek, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 12.
- 42.
Altman, 87.
- 43.
Beebe, 15.
- 44.
See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (London; New York: Routledge, 1982), 67.
- 45.
Golden, 223.
- 46.
For examples of valentines, see Emma Bradford, Roses are Red: Love and Scorn in Victorian Valentines (London: Joseph, 1986); Judith Holder, Sweethearts & Valentines (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1980); Frank Staff, The Valentine and Its Origin (New York: Praeger, 1969); Ruth Webb Lee, A History of Valentines (New York: The Studio Publications, 1952).
- 47.
Henkin, 152–3.
- 48.
See John R. Nelson, Hardy’s People: Structure and Character in the Major Fiction (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1974), 55. Nelson emphasises that ‘Bathsheba’s valentine arrives by mail, and thus can penetrate the almonry’.
- 49.
Jean Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (London: Elek, 1971), 160.
- 50.
Marjorie Garson, Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 32.
- 51.
Geoffrey Thurley, The Psychology of Hardy’s Novels: The Nervous and the Statuesque (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 74.
- 52.
Golden, 228.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
See Jennifer Phegley, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 55 and Ginger S. Frost, Broken Promises: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 30–1.
- 55.
Randall Craig, Promising Language: Betrothal in Victorian Law and Fiction (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 13.
- 56.
See Golden, 225. Golden highlights that ‘[s]ince senders and receivers of valentines were typically members of the same community, anonymous senders had to take care to conceal their penmanship, as Hardy’s Bathsheba forgets to do’.
- 57.
Craig, 13.
- 58.
Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York: New York State Press, 1990), 87.
- 59.
Robert Langbaum, Thomas Hardy in Our Time (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 86.
- 60.
Jean Brooks, 172.
- 61.
Miller, ‘Sam Weller’s Valentine’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 113.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Koehler, K. (2016). ‘A more material existence than her own’: Epistolary Selves in Hardy’s Fiction. In: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29102-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29101-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29102-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)